How sprint capacity is calculated
Sprint capacity = (team size × working days − days off) × focus factor. The formula is simple; the honesty is in the focus factor: the fraction of a workday that actually goes to sprint work after meetings, code review, support rotations, and interruptions. Most established teams sustain 70-80%; new teams and teams with heavy support duties often run lower.
A worked example for a two-week sprint:
- 5 people × 10 working days = 50 gross person-days
- − 4 days of planned leave = 46 available person-days
- × 75% focus factor = 34.5 person-days of real capacity
Skipping step 2 is the classic holiday-sprint planning failure; skipping step 3 is why sprints planned "by gut feel" overcommit by a quarter.
Capacity and velocity work together
Capacity tells you how much time the team has; velocity tells you how many points that time historically produces. When availability drops, scale the velocity you plan against: a team averaging 30 points at full strength should commit to roughly 30 × availability. Planning a holiday sprint against full-strength velocity is how December commitments die, and why velocity is a capacity input, not a productivity score.
New team, no velocity yet? Capacity in person-days is your only planning input for the first few sprints; pair it with a calibration baseline and expect the numbers to firm up by sprint three or four.
From capacity to a sprint plan
Capacity sets the budget; estimation spends it. The flow most teams settle into:
- Calculate capacity (above) before sprint planning.
- Estimate the candidate stories as a team: private votes, simultaneous reveal, so the numbers aren't anchored.
- Commit stories until the points hit the scaled velocity, then stop, even if the backlog doesn't.
